New and noteworthy

In Employee Contracts, you can specify the minimum or maximum time between shifts with minutesBetweenShiftsRules. You can now provide a scope for these rules. The scope will limit which pairs of shifts the rule is applied to. The scope excludes shift pairs where the start of the later shift is after the end of the prior shift plus the scope duration. See the updated Employee contracts for examples.

We have extended shift priorities to distinguish between mandatory (default) and optional shifts. Optional shifts are useful in scenarios when conformance with a soft constraint (e.g. a PREFERRED multi-day pattern rule) is more desired than having an extra shift assigned.

For more information, please see:

We have added a custom move to facilitate matching of PREFERRED patterns.

You may also specify the weight of a multi-day shift pattern in the relation to the other multi-day patterns. See Employee works preferred multi-day shift sequence pattern rule for more information.

The weight can be used to migrate from REQUIRED patterns to PREFERRED patterns with high weight, see Upgrading to the latest versions for details.

We have added 4 new KPIs that provide information on the employees' preferences:

See OpenAPI Spec or the Timefold Platform UI for a description of their meaning. These KPIs are marked as experimental and subject to change. We would love your feedback.

We have fixed the multi-day pattern rules to correctly handle a pattern starting with OFF. Please note that if you use a pattern starting or ending with OFF, you must specify the planning window interval to ensure the pattern matches properly throughout the whole period you are planning for.

The REQUIRED multi-day patterns are now deprecated and will be removed in a future version in favour of PREFERRED patterns with a high weight.

See Employee works preferred multi-day shift sequence pattern rule for more information.

We have added a constraint to prefer assigning employees to shifts that are close to each other to minimize the time between shifts. This is useful for cases where the employee works multiple shifts per day.

See Minimize gaps between shifts for employee rule for more information.

We have replaced the existing demo datasets with new ones that are more realistic and better showcase the model’s features.

The new demo datasets cover basic Employee Shift Scheduling capabilities, Contract Period Rules, and Hourly Demand Rules.

We have added the ability to define custom priorities and weights for shifts. Whenever the model needs to choose between multiple shifts to assign to an employee, it will favor shifts with higher priority.

See Unassigned shift rule for more information.

We extended the period rules to restrict the maximum number of locations an employee works during a period.

See documentation of the rules for more information:

We are renaming the “Employee Scheduling” model to “Employee Shift Scheduling” to distinguish between future other models involving scheduling for employees. (We are not changing API urls or entity names, because …)

We have also marked this model as “Stable”, meaning that we promise backwards-compatibility for future minor releases.

We have removed the shift’s duration from the constraint’s penalty. We now only consider the shift’s assignmentPriority.

We added a new Balance time worked rule.

Use this rule to make sure the time worked is balanced fairly across employees.

Tags can now be used to define preferred and required shifts for employees.

See documentation of the rules for more information:

We have improved our documentation related to tags to more clearly give an overview of their possible uses. See Tags and tag types for more information.

We fixed an issue in Balance shift count rule, that caused performance degradation for big datasets.

We fixed a bug for the Minutes between shifts rules, where the minimum was not always honored for shift sequences.

Period rule defined as a part of employee contract can now specify a validity date time span to further limit when the rule is applicable.

Please see Employee contract period rule for additional details.

All ISO 8601 local date time types have been replaced by ISO 8601 local date time with offset to UTC (Coordinated Universal Time) to support multiple time zones.

Please see Upgrading to the latest versions and Timezones and Daylight Saving Time (DST) for additional details.

Employees and shifts can now provide a location. This allows you to restrict the possible shifts where an employee can work and minimize the travel distance.

The following constraints have been added:

Employee preferences are more likely to be satisfied for employees with higher priority.

Affects the following constraints

See employee priority.

Affects the following constraints:

The filtering allows you to include, or exclude shifts worked by specific employee types. For example, you can consider only shifts worked by full time employees.